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Yesterday I read in *Pravda* certain reports that convinced me that the moment of the general offensive may be nearer than we assumed at the congress, and for which the young comrades came down on us so hard. But I will speak of these reports later; for now I must say that the nearer the general offensive, the more "opportunistically" we must act. Now you will all return home and tell the workers that we have become more prudent than we were before the III Congress. You should not be embarrassed; you will say that we made mistakes and now want to act more cautiously; thereby we will win over to our side the masses from the Social Democratic and independent Social Democratic parties—masses that are objectively being pushed toward us by the whole course of events, but which fear us. I want to use our example to show that one must act more cautiously.

At the beginning of the war, we Bolsheviks adhered to only one slogan—civil war, and a merciless one at that. We branded as a traitor everyone who did not come out for civil war. But when we returned to Russia in March 1917, we completely changed our position. When we returned to Russia and spoke with peasants and workers, we saw that they all stood for the defense of the fatherland, but of course in an entirely different sense than the Mensheviks, and we could not call these simple workers and peasants scoundrels and traitors. We characterized this as "conscientious defensism." I want to write a large article about this generally and publish all the materials. On April 7 I published theses in which I spoke of—prudence and patience*. Our initial position at the beginning of the war was correct; then it was important to create a certain decisive nucleus. Our subsequent position was also correct. It proceeded from the premise that it was necessary to win over the masses. We already spoke out against the idea of immediately overthrowing the Provisional Government. I wrote: "We must overthrow the government because it is oligarchic, not a popular government, because it cannot give us either bread or peace. But it cannot be overthrown immediately because it relies on the workers' Soviets and still retains the confidence of the workers. We are not Blanquists; we do not want to govern with a minority of the working class against the majority"**. The Cadets, who are subtle politicians, immediately noticed the contradiction between our former and new position and called us hypocrites. But since at the same time they called us spies, traitors, scoundrels, and German agents, the first name made no impression whatsoever. On April 20 the first crisis occurred. Milyukov's Note on the Dardanelles exposed the government as imperialist. Following this, armed masses of soldiers moved on the government building and overthrew Milyukov. At their head stood a certain Linde, a non-party member. This movement was not organized by the party. We characterized this movement at the time as follows: it was somewhat more than an armed demonstration and somewhat less than an armed uprising. At our conference on April 22 the left tendency demanded the immediate overthrow of the government. The Central Committee, on the contrary, spoke against the slogan of civil war, and we gave all agitators in the provinces instructions to refute the shameless lie that the Bolsheviks—

* See *Works*, 5th ed., vol. 31, pp. 113-118. [Ed.]
** *Ibid.*, p. 147. [Ed.]